Adam Walsh

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT ADAM WALSH - PAGE 3

By TREVOR JENSEN Staff Writer and Jay Grelan of the Mobile Press Register in Alabama contributed to this report, October 19, 1995

Hollywood police have until Feb. 16 to produce a viable suspect in the 14-year-old murder of Adam Walsh or they must make their mountain of case files public, a Broward judge ruled on Wednesday. Several newspapers, including the Sun-Sentinel, have sued the city in an effort to open the files on the 6-year-old boy's unsolved 1981 murder, arguing there is no imminent possibility of an arrest. Broward Circuit Judge Leroy Moe denied the media's request in June after police testified the investigation was still active and suspects remained at large.

WEST PALM BEACH -- The national statistics that show that most child molesters are males and work in environments where they have easy access to children concern teacher Robert Wenst. "It is scary to know that there are men out there in my profession that would abuse a child. But on the other hand, it is scary that I could be reported for something that is innocent," said Wenst, a fifth-grade teacher at J.C. Mitchell Elementary School in Boca Raton. Child abuse and molestation were the topics on Friday at a workshop for teachers called, "Kids and Company: Together for Safety," sponsored by the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and business sponsor Pizza Hut dedicated a kiosk in the Cutler Ridge Mall to help find missing children on Thursday. It is the 46th Deliver Me Home kiosk. The touch-sensitive kiosks display photos of children missing from local areas and from across the nation. The kiosks also provide the latest information about the missing. The kiosk dedicated Thursday is the first in Dade County. In August, a kiosk was placed at Sawgrass Mills Mall in Sunrise.

Lying on the dirt beside his mother's grave, Ottis Elwood Toole would sometimes feel the ground move, he told psychologists. The seventh-grade dropout and convicted serial killer is the strongest suspect Hollywood police have in the murder of Adam Walsh. Toole even confessed to the crime only two years after the boy turned up dead, but has never been charged. "Well, It's true. I grabbed him and raped him and murdered him and cut him up and tossed his parts around," Toole wrote in an October 1988 letter to The Orlando Sentinel.

Ten years ago today, a little gap-toothed boy wearing a baseball cap was snatched from a Sears department store in Hollywood when his mother was not watching. His name was Adam Walsh, and he was 6 years old. Two weeks later, on Aug. 10, 1981, Adam`s severed head was found by two fishermen in a canal 120 miles away, near Vero Beach. His killer has never been found. The abduction and murder of Adam Walsh was one of the most widely publicized cases in the country. It changed the way a nation thinks about the problem of missing children.

By SCOTT GLOVER and EVELYN LARRUBIA Staff Writers and Staff Writer Warren Richey contributed to this report, February 22, 1996

A former Jacksonville Sheriff's Office detective who hoped to profit from a book deal in the Adam Walsh case fed a suspect secret information about the boy's murder, then went to Hollywood police and said he had obtained a confession to the crime, police investigative files show. In 1983, Jacksonville Homicide Detective Jesse "Buddy" Terry was among a team of investigators who met with suspect Ottis Toole about the murder of 6-year-old Adam, who disappeared from a Hollywood Sears store on July 27, 1981.

The parents of Adam Walsh on Wednesday filed a motion asking a judge to keep Hollywood police investigative files of their son's 1981 murder out of the public's hands. John and Reve Walsh's request also says Hollywood Police Chief Richard Witt "planned to publicly identify the person that police believed responsible for the Adam Walsh homicide at the time the file was to be released." Witt denies it. The motion filed by the Walshes' attorney, George J. Terwilliger III of Washington, D.C., comes two days after Broward State Attorney Michael Satz filed a similar motion to intervene.

Adam Walsh was the catalyst for putting missing children's faces on milk cartons. Jimmy Ryce's legacy may well be getting photos of missing children published on the World Wide Web the day they disappear. Jimmy's parents, Don and Claudine Ryce, planned to meet today with a computer expert, a private detective and a group of volunteers to talk about what it will take to pull that off, said Elizabeth Tyre, one of the volunteers and a friend of the Ryces. On Saturday, hours after learning that his 9-year-old son had been murdered, a grieving yet determined Don Ryce said: "It's too late for Jimmy.

What's going on in the State Attorney's Office that a "complete review" of South Florida's most notorious unsolved murder case doesn't take place until nearly 15 years after the crime? Or is the untimely need for a review just part of an ongoing coverup? Might it be a coverup about how and how well a police investigation was conducted, about what suspects were investigated and cleared, about what leads were followed and abandoned, about who might have killed Adam Walsh and, in fact, about why unspecified "new developments" tend to coincide so conveniently with newspaper requests for the files from a murder case more than a decade old?

The Hollywood police force is arguably one of the nation's most concerned with tracking missing children. It was on that agency's watch in 1981 that 6-year-old Adam Walsh disappeared -- mobilizing South Florida and spawning a wholesale revision of child abduction services. Adam's father is America's Most Wanted host John Walsh. Since becoming one of the first agencies to sign on to A Child Is Missing four years ago, the Hollywood Police Department has used the service to track the whereabouts of about 3,190 children and successfully recover 1,446 of them.